Design your way

Back in the good old days, there used to be a separation between the groups of design and development that was thought to be extremely clear.

In fact, not a lot of individuals were actually involved with either group. Nowadays, however, it’s not all that uncommon to find that a web designer doesn’t also take part in some form of development or user experience work on top of all of their normal duties.

These days, we are becoming a great deal more resourceful, especially since we are obtaining more skills within our chosen fields. However, the biggest issue at hand is that a web designer can also translate into someone who performs the following tasks:

• Design
• All coding
• Some coding
• The full design-to-development process

A full stack designer, on the other hand, is an individual who not only creates a basic concept, but who also delivers a full product upon total completion. The basic process is as follows:

• Concept/strategy
• Design
• Implementation of idea

Why should you become a full stack designer?

Image source: Tim Smith

The role and learning skills of the traditional designer have both gone from being something that we would like to have to becoming an absolutely necessity.

If you blatantly choose not to expand your overall skill set, the end result will be you capping off your overall growth potential, which means you are essentially setting yourself up to fail in the long run. Nowadays, designers are being expected to do more than just simply design something.

If you truly want to become a better designer than you already are, you need to worry less about design itself. Instead, take the time to focus on everything that design actually connects to in the world.

You’ll start to realize just how much of the big picture you’re missing the very second that you start to realize just how much influence some parts of the development process itself has on design.

This means that your design will become much better due to the fact that your overall comprehension of the product creation process is constantly growing. This is how the mindset of a full stack designer traditionally works.

Full stack

Image source: Nico Encarnacion

The term “full stack”, at least in terms of computer science, refers to an individual who could handle virtually every layer of creating a product all on their own. Nowadays, however, the full stack designers are essentially starting to become extremely cross-disciplinary and their age is truly dawning.

Confused?

You may have not been able to determine that there actually is a difference between a full stack designer and a full stack developer. That’s ok. Don’t feel bad about it. It happens to all of us at some point.

The developer is focused more on understanding a great deal of technology in order to make improvements to engineering, while the designer concentrates on understanding the overall process of actually creating a product so that they are able to better design and deliver that very product in the future.

Get more skills and make the whole process easier for your team

When you choose to become a full stack designer, you are essentially helping everyone who is involved with the creation of a specific product. This can be the case even if only a small amount of your skills aren’t being used all that much.

Regardless, your position allows you to understand every single part of the product development process. This allows you to not only deliver design that can not only make improvements to the product, but also the overall efficiency of the team you are working with as well.

Even better is the fact that your position as a full stack designer means that you will be able to understand everything that every member of your team is saying to you regardless of their own positions on the same team.

It’s important to work with your team

We can add a lot of value to things when we are able to one-line the focus of both our skills and professional lives in a quick and efficient manner.

By our titles, we can typically tell other individuals what to do, as well as determine and control exactly where our professional careers are heading. However, titles are also something that a lot of us have trouble with as well, as it can be extremely difficult to find one that accurately explains both our limitations and skills.

Being able to give ourselves a title isn’t the only benefit of being able to completely understand full stack terminology, however; it’s also important to learn how to become that one person on a team who can step in and help out with virtually anything whenever we are needed to do so.

Even better, we could also use our job skills to help plan ahead depending on what the focus of our main job is at that time.

Don’t stop learning

Image source: Alexander Mostov

We all know that titles are important to any working professional; however, this is mostly because they only represent the certain skills that we possess in our chosen fields.

When we take the time to invest a lot more time into expanding our skills, everyone who is involved will end up benefiting in the long run. Education is extremely important in a fast-paced industry such as this, which means it should be used to our advantage to become the best workers that we can possibly be.

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